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Comment by ranqet | Hacker News Reader

So, the main reason he switched to a Windows machine was to use the latest/fastest hardware with Adobe Lightroom and Premiere, but then he goes on to say the Lightroom and Premiere don’t take advantage of many core CPUs, the fastest GPUs, fastest SSDs, etc...

And Windows is fine after tweaking and adjusting dozens of settings.

I’ll just stick with a Mac.

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Premiere Pro definitely takes advantage of GPU and CPU very efficiently. Lightroom does not - which is why instead of going for some 18 core i9 7980XE build where it has more cores but a much lower clock per core, i opted for just 6 cores but with a very high clock.

I don't think that Premier does really take advantage of video cards. I saw a video where they had switched a really old GTX 660 vs a 1080ti and the render time was not changed between them.

I did a bench of the Premiere Pro h264 benchmark ("PPBM") with CUDA acceleration and without (software): the difference was 7m 4sec without GPU and 48 seconds with GPU.

Sorry, I should have phrased it better, you don't have to have the latest and greatest video card for Premiere. But, yes, you are correct, having GPU acceleration does work.

It's possible the operation bandwidth limited in which case at some point a faster card won't speed it up any more. But gpu acceleration vs software is an enormous difference in premiere

In our workload this is definitely the case. When on the GPU the processing is almost infinitely quick. It's the transfer to and from the GPU memory which takes the time. This might be the case in the parent post.

There was a guy who managed to go directly from the SATA controller to GPU memory by modifying the Linux kernel for some postgres database queries and got massive speedup. Would love it if that sort of optimization could be more readily available.

It doesn't feel like it uses my AMD card at all. Whenever I check taskmanager it's always using CPU, even when rendering. Don't know if it just doesn't support AMD cards, but I'm not sure what would help increase it's performance aside from RAM now.

Actual encoding for renders is all CPU based: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2122549

Personally, I use DaVinci Resolve, but the results are largely the same, with exports being largely entirely CPU dependent: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/DaVinci-Resolve-1...

Looks like Puget Systems does a lot of performance shootouts, including some Premiere ones: https://www.pugetsystems.com/all_articles.php

Philip Bloom recently did a writeup of his switch from a Mac to a PC for his editing machine (yes, it's definitely a trend, unless you are a FCP diehard or doing audio production, the Mac is sadly done as a content production platform): http://philipbloom.net/blog/makingtheswitch/

Will be interesting if they revisit some of the shootouts post-meltdown/spectre patching...

Seems a bit short sighted of the lightroom developers high end mac users have been worried about Apples ignoring of the high end for years now.

Ryzen and Threadripper is supposed to be a beast for content creation that can use a lot of cores

I recall reading in SoS (sound on Sound) years ago that the big name recoding studios where worried about this back then.

And Windows is fine after tweaking and adjusting dozens of settings.

MacOS or Linux also require tweaking to be useful for most people.

I probably flip several settings to make macOS liveable for myself. I’d have to do all the adjustments Paul discussed and probably more to make Windows liveable.

I on the other hand need about a day or two (interspersed with real work) to tweak a Linux system, a few more than that to tweak a Windows system, and a week or two for a Mac. And newer versions of all of them keep breaking the essential tweaks, so I am constantly frustrated by the OS getting in my way.

You can prove anything with anecdotes :)

to be useful? For most people? wow, that's quite a claim.

I am still shocked Adobe software handles 4k systems so incredibly poorly.

For image and photo editing - after many, many years I ditched Adobe Photoshop for Pixelmator Pro - couldn’t be happier, there’s a few workflows that they’re still improving with very regular releases but god damn it’s fast!

You can do whatever you want with Windows.

Even after tweaking dozens of settings on my Mac, I still don’t like it.

Can you see the time with a fullscreen video without having to minimize the video yet?

I'll take the downvote as a "no".

I didn't downvote you, but there are dozens of utilities to do this.

Here's one way to do it with AutoHotKey - https://autohotkey.com/board/topic/23879-always-on-top-clock...

Sucks that the best approximation is an always-on-top clock.

It's in the taskbar, they have functionality to show / hide the taskbar, they should combine the two.

Not really because I can make it look like whatever I want. And I can place it wherever I want because Windows is flexible like that.

Meanwhile Apple doesn’t even let you change the color of your mouse pointer. You couldn’t even replace the dock if you wanted to because Apple hides the API that lets a replacement change the usable display size. They don’t even let you soft-disable an external display! LMAO

Windows is so much better. I can run Windows on any hardware that I want to and I can make it do exactly whatever I want it to. And it’s got way more software. And better software.

Mac isn't really an option if you want a powerful desktop though, unless you want to spend $5k I guess...

Yet OP spent that and more...

For a whole lot more performance than you'll get out of your comparably priced Mac. I guess he did have to... change settings though, so the thousands spent on mac aesthetics are completely worth it.

I guess if your time is free or you enjoy all the labor that goes into research, assembly and maintenance, sure, this is cheaper.

It's really not that hard, and it's a myth that your free time is worth money. I have a child, a wife, and a demanding job. I still somehow find the hour or two it takes to order parts and the hour or two it takes to piece the PC together. I don't know about you, maybe you can just open a laptop and make $500 / hour on demand whenever you like, but I can't. Not sure what maintenance you're referring to either.

Yeah, but nobody is saying that OP made smart decisions here...

But a $5k Mac will lag a $5k Pc in performance.

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